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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m not recommending it, I’m describing why saying it adds no security is silly.

    The keys being compromised on some motherboards doesn’t mean the whole concept is suddenly inert for every single user

    If everyone has a copy of my passwords and authenticator keys, that wouldn’t suddenly make 2 factor auth a compromised idea.

    Hell, even if you are one of those people running a machine with the compromised keys, it’s still going to block malware that was written before the keys were leaked unless malware authors have also figured out time travel.


  • 9point6@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlGrub and the Microsoft Ransomware
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    3 days ago

    Well boot sector viruses used to be all the rage in the 90s, they’re entirely impossible under secure boot

    Malware rootkits were a pretty big problem about a decade ago, I understand the techniques those mostly used are more or less impossible under secure boot now too

    Then we could go into all the government and adjacent industry use cases where state-sponsored targeted attacks are a real concern. Measures like filling USB ports with super glue and desoldering microphones on company laptops is not unheard of in those circles, so blocking unknown bootloaders from executing is an absolute no brainer.

    Saying it provides no security is just not true. Your front door isn’t only secure if someone has failed to break in


  • You don’t have to

    If you only need it for 90 days before it expires, Microsoft will give you the VM for free (and if you’re particularly industrious, you might write a script that then installs a load of your shit for you to run after you fire up a fresh one)

    If you don’t care about potentially breaking the law you can run it forever with a couple of scripts you can find on GitHub

    If you don’t want to break the law but also don’t want to pay full price you can get a dubious but working key from sites like G2A and cdkeys

    If that’s still too sketchy there’s the OEM licenses (honestly not worth it since they can only activate on a single machine ever)

    Or finally you might feel sorry for Microsoft for some strange reason and want to go full retail price.

    Basically the same experience with all options for a lot of cases, they’re just happy to have users it seems











  • The software isn’t really the hard thing about these companies, the customer and provider UIs are nothing special and they achieve their scale using fairly industry standard event driven tools and cloud compute. They all talk a lot at industry conferences, so it’s no secret really.

    Ensuring a restaurant will make the food for an order, ensuring a delivery person shows up to collect it, ensuring that food makes it to its destination in the same condition it left the restaurant, ensuring everyone gets paid at the end.

    Preventing any of that from going wrong and handling it when it does is where the value of these companies lies.

    Who is going to step in if a restaurant starts ignoring orders, or a driver starts eating the food, or a customer does a fraudulent chargeback?

    Then there’s the money issue: where does the money go when people pay? Who owns the merchant bank account? Does every driver need a merchant bank account? How is tax accounting handled?

    You can’t use cash for this system as both the driver and restaurant need to be paid (and TBF, whoever is paying for hosting the back end servers), and the driver won’t necessarily go back to that restaurant



  • I vaguely remember getting into a WPA network (that I owned!) using kismet about 15 years ago with relative ease, but I’m struggling to remember details about that process.

    I also remember reading that WPA2 non-enterprise was broken a while ago, however I just looked into it and both of the main exploits I can find were patchable (and have been patched) at client OS level (They were the KRACK and FragAttacks). Seems like there has already been something found wrong with WPA3 too that’s also been addressed.

    So yeah as you say back to brute forcing for the most part. Forcing reconnects was a pretty easy way to get more handshakes to record back when I last tried, so I assume that still has decent levels of success, given the prevalence of mesh networks. Looking further it seems people use a tool called hashcat today to get pretty rapid results doing the actual brute forcing using a modern GPU.

    But yes very good advice all in all, long passwords and the highest WPA version you can get away with are going to make an attackers job harder.

    Thanks for the reply, you got me to go back down an interesting rabbit hole I’ve not looked at in a while


  • Worth highlighting WiFi blasts all your data in all directions, and unless you’re using enterprise/WPA3 encryption with a strong password, someone determined enough can break in.

    If someone wanted to they could park near your house and run aircrack (or whatever the modern suite is called) without you ever knowing. FWIW this is why it’s good to set up a way of getting notified about new devices on your network (most modern non-ISP routers support a way of doing this)

    Conversely, I believe most ethernet NICs discard any packet not intended for it at hardware level, they’re super optimised for speed, it would be much slower to leave that for software. I’m not 100% if that’s universal however, so I’d try and double check that





  • Nope sadly, AI needs GPUs and it makes up the bulk of sales of these chips now.

    It would be suicide for any of the companies that could make these processors to not go after the biggest market. The result of a company not doing that would be watching all their competitors grow and advance their products whilst their company’s value drops and products stagnate, possibly to a point that recovery to competitiveness would be hard if not impossible.